


Mother Tabris

by AuthorinExile



Series: The Hero's Design [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Origins - Leliana's Song
Genre: Adaia Loves Her Child, Adaia Tries, Adaia is the Best Mother, Bittersweet Ending, Brutal Murder, Canon Backstory, Dalish Adaia, Dalish Elves, F/M, Gen, Hate Crimes, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Lavellan Adaia, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Revenge, Sort Of, Vague Reference to Leliana's Song DLC, playing fast and loose with canon, tragic backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-14 03:39:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuthorinExile/pseuds/AuthorinExile
Summary: "We don't want to look like troublemakers," Cyrion said, and his stern expression melted away into something softer. "Adaia made that mistake.""The humans that killed her made a bigger one," the young bride thought but did not say. She knew better than that, now.~~~~~~The Warden's mother was killed by humans when she was very young. Adaia was full of life and full of love and a bit wild, but Tabris remembers her as a kind-hearted woman who believed that even humans could be good, even as they murdered her.





	1. Curiosity

**Author's Note:**

> This is purely self-indulgent nonsense meant to offer an explanation for the death of Adaia Tabris other than the vague, "Humans did it," provided in the conversation between Cyrion and a City Elf Warden.
> 
> This was meant to be a one-shot, but it ran away from me, as so many of my stories do.
> 
> Elvish was taken from Project Elvhen. Bless the individual who created that.

Adaia was born to a Dalish clan.

  
This, Cyrion often joked, was the worst kept secret of the Tabris household. Though it was not publicly discussed, the entire Alienage knew that Adaia was no ordinary city elf. This, he claimed, one could tell by looking at her.

  
Adaia laughed along with her husband, but she knew that he only joked to hide true concern. After all, most of the elves in the Alienage did not have any martial training at all, and those who were able to fight did everything in their power to hide their skill.

  
Just as well, Adaia thought. While she might have once dreamed of the day that she could liberate her city-dwelling people, she learned quickly that it was a fool’s dream. They would be bested by sheer numbers, if not by skill alone, in a matter of moments. No, Adaia quite thought that the best course of action was a peaceful sort of reform, accomplished through the people themselves.

  
Unfortunately, Adaia was no diplomat. Oh, she could charm and flirt and persuade until others were eating out of her palms, but she could do little to influence the wills of those humans who decided the fate of her people.

  
In any case, she would be an extremely poor excuse for a diplomat these days. Not many ambassadors with frightened little girls hiding in their skirts, she’d wager.

  
_A small price to pay, for such a lovely prize_ , Adaia thought, scooping her giggling daughter into her arms and quite forgetting the laundry she was hanging.

  
“Mae,” her child whispered, and Adaia’s heart thrilled to hear even the smallest bit of Elvish leave her daughter’s lips, “Why do the humans hate us?” And a tiny hand, small even for her age, tugged at one of Adaia’s many braids.

  
This was a question that her child had asked many times before, and Adaia always provided an answer along the same lines.

  
“Oh, da’fen, my little wolf, they do not hate us. Humans are not so different from The People, once you know them. Humans just...don’t understand us, and they fear what they do not understand.”

  
Ah, there it was. That little crease her young daughter gained when she was thinking particularly hard on a topic always appeared after Adaia answered.

  
“Mae, are the humans bad?”

  
Oh. Well, this was a new one.

  
Adaia stopped bouncing her small child and chose her words very carefully. The last thing she needed was her honest little girl getting in trouble because she said the wrong thing around the wrong human.

  
“No, da’fen. Humans are not wholly bad. What matters, darling, is the individual. There are many good people who happen to be human, just as there are many mean people who happen to be elves.”

  
“Like Shianni,” the little girl grumbled, and Adaia threw back her head and laughed. There had been many conversations about Shianni’s “badness,” but the child had not yet grasped that her older cousin, while a bit harsh, was as loving and helpful as a child could be.

  
She would let Cyrion handle it, this time.

  
“Oh, off with you, girl. Go on, pester Meanie Shianni into helping you bring in firewood for supper. Your mae has quite a bit of cleaning to do, and very little time to actually do it!”

  
The girl giggled and scampered off, and Adaia’s smile slowly slipped as she watched the love of her life rush out of the house.

  
One day, Adaia knew, her daughter would leave the Alienage and have to survive on her own. Whether she would leave to join Adaia’s clan or to marry a city elf changed depending on which parent you asked, but she would leave, and she would have to survive in a world with few “good” humans.

  
But she was Adaia’s daughter. She would survive.


	2. Training

Adaia was born to a Dalish clan and had spent the majority of her life among them. Because of this, she had mastered a weapon at a very young age. Adaia’s weapon of choice had always been the dagger, but she had a fair amount of skill with a bow as well.

  
As she watched her child fumble the practice dagger again and again, she was very thankful for her knowledge of archery. The child was clearly not meant to be a rouge, but Adaia could work with that. She’d known plenty of warriors in her day, after all.

  
“Here, da’fen, try this. Hold it up--no, no, like this. See? There we are. Now--”

  
The arrow was embedded halfway within the tree before she had finished speaking, and it prompted a whooping yell of joy that Adaia’s daughter was only too happy to return.

  
“Ah, darling! Now, to find you a practice sword! My girl, you will be an excellent little warrior, someday!”

  
“Like you?” the girl asked, looking delighted at the prospect.

  
Adaia smiled, but it only made her seem sad and wistful.

  
“Oh, da’fen, you will be greater than I could ever dream to be.”


	3. The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the version that I edited to be less depressing.
> 
> I'm not sure it worked.

They had descended upon her like vultures on carrion.

  
One moment, Adaia had been walking alongside her darling daughter. In the next, there was a guardsman sneering in her face and saying that he recognized her.

  
“You’re that elf bitch,” he slurred, breathing whiskey fumes into her face. “You’re that one that escaped the dungeons. Left a trail of bodies, you did...”

  
That had been months ago, and _she_ had killed no one, and there was no way that he knew her face, but Adaia knew that telling him such was a death wish. Instead, she hung her head and kept from making eye contact while sheepishly murmuring that it couldn’t have been her, she was just a housewife, and her husband was expecting her to make dinner, so if he would just excuse her--

  
The guard caught her wrist as she tried to inch around him. He was distracted by Adaia’s daughter, who gasped quietly and tried to hide behind her mother’s skirts. He smiled lecherously.

  
“Well, now,” he rumbled. “Who’s this pretty little thing?”

  
From there, it was a blur of movement in Adaia’s mind. She thought that she might have hit the man, but she had snatched up her child and bolted down the street so quickly that it was impossible to remember.

  
The sound of armored footsteps rang out behind her, growing steadily louder and closer as they gathered more guardsmen and gained on her.

  
Adaia was born to a Dalish clan, but she had been a city elf for years now, and the streets of Denerim’s Alienage were as familiar to her as the aravel she had once slept in as the Lavellan clan traversed the wilds of Thedas. She had the advantage here, and it was the matter of a few sharp turns to reach a place safely hidden from view.

  
Behind the shop, there was a crevice in the high stone wall that locked the elves out of sight. It was scarcely as wide as a barrel and not as tall, but Adaia’s daughter had always been a small thing, and it was hardly a trial to push the teary-eyed girl to safety.

  
“Mae!”

  
“No,” Adaia whispered past the lump in her throat. “No, stay here. Do not move, do not speak out, do not do anything until your father and your cousins come for you, do you understand?”

  
“But--”

  
“No! Do you understand?”

  
Her daughter-- _brave girl, how I love you_ \--nodded and stifled her cries in her muddied dress.

  
The sound of metal boots was closing in.

  
“Da’fen, my fierce little wolf, I love you so. You know this? I love you, and you have always made me so proud. Hush now. Hush now, and stay still.”

  
Adaia had just moved a barrel to guard her most beloved treasure when the footsteps neared and stopped, and a circle of furious men surrounded her.

  
Adaia was born to a Dalish clan, and she used her family’s dagger to devastating effect, killing the first two men that approached her. After that, she was outnumbered and overpowered and held down.

  
She realized too late that her daughter could still see around the barrel, but she did not have long to regret it.

~~~~~~

A handful of minutes passed, but to the youngest Tabris, it felt an eternity before Cyrion retrieved her.

  
The child did not see her father pocket a curved dagger, left to rust in a pool of her mother’s blood. She did not see anything except the knife poised at her mother’s ears for the rest of the night, and for a great many years, it would be the only memory that she could link to humans.


	4. Adaia's Daughter

There was a man standing over Nelaros’ body with a bloodied sword and a cruel smile.

  
The young bride recognized this man’s smile. She had once watched that same smile form as a child hid in her mother’s skirts, as a knife separated the points from her mother’s ears, as the wearer of that smile held a beaten and bloodied mother down and--

  
The youngest Tabris knew that smile and that face, aged as it was, and she repaid the owner by separating it from the rest of him.

~~~~~~

Tabris was kneeling in the mud in her freshly polished armor and cooing at a mabari nearly as tall as she was and certainly twice as wide. The dog was adoring the attention, and the young recruit was clearly happy to coddle the ridiculous thing.

  
It was not the strangest thing about this elf, Alistair was learning, but it was oddly adorable.

  
“Well,” Alistair began, doing his very best not to associate the word “adorable” with his colleague, “what will you call him? We can’t exactly refer to him as ‘mabari’ forever, can we?”

  
The Warden smiled, but it was a sad thing.

  
“Da’fen,” she whispered almost reverently and grinned as the dog danced on the spot. “My lovable little wolf. Fierce little thing…”

  
It was not the most fearsome name for a mabari, and it certainly did not inspire the same level of fear as “Ripper” or “Fang” or any of the other names he had heard from soldiers with mabari of their own, but, as he watched the way Tabris doted on the animal, Alistair decided that he could not think of a better one.


End file.
